How could it have been otherwise? Were the party leaders going to give up any of their present dominance over caucus, even to so slight a degree? Were MPs going to defy their leaders on such an existential question? Were they even inclined to, having been selected from the start for their pliability and groomed to obey ever since?
Nevertheless, if ever members of Parliament were going to recover some of their lost independence, not to say dignity — if ever there was a moment for them to take a stand, to begin the process of rescuing Parliament from its current irrelevance — this was it.

Michael Chong’s private member’s bill, the Reform Act, is the plucky, underdog outgrowth of years of frustration among backbench MPs about the steady erosion of their powers, beginning really in 1970 under Pierre Trudeau, who famously referred to them as “nobodies.

It would be easy to blame all three major federal parties for the pre-summer torpor that has settled over Ottawa this spring, as MPs turn their minds to garden parties, BBQs and a break from the dispiriting exercise that is question period.

OTTAWA — Conservative MP Michael Chong is preparing amendments to his Reform Act, which strips party leaders of a key power and hands clear rules to party caucuses to dump their leader, the Ottawa Citizen has learned.

The details of Alison Redford’s disgrace need not detain us: the $45,000 spent to fly to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, the trips on government jets for her daughter and her daughter’s friends, or to fly to party fundraisers.

OTTAWA — So this is what a Conservative convention looks like. After that bizarre lockdown in Calgary last fall — reporters harassed and penned in at every turn, the prime minister’s defiantly empty speech, the air heavy with self-congratulation and paranoia — the annual Manning Networking conference exudes an altogether different spirit: thoughtful, open, introspective … and conservative.